Muammar Al Gaddafi And Augusto C. Sandino

Unsconscious looking-glass resentment once made Richard Nixon’s Chief of Staff Alexander Haig call British Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington a “duplicitous bastard”. The sick irony of Haig’s petulant blart is that US foreign policy has always been one of deceitful cunning, evil mass-murder and global criminality, notoriously exemplified by President Nixon and Henry Kissinger. It continues unchanged with plutocrat-catamite Barack Obama.

Svelte houseboy-President Obama rents out his duplicitous-bastard talents to help corrupt Western corporate elites and their allies pauperize their own peoples and plunder vulnerable countries like Libya. Obama sells his crimes as promoting democracy and prosperity. His weird-familiar Hillary Clinton and her depleted-uranium blasted-heath sisters, Samantha Power and Susan Rice, provide back up.

These serial-child-killers try hard to outdo Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright, who notoriously argued that 500,000 needlessly dead Iraqi children represented “a price worth paying”. They work overtime to hubble-bubble, toil-and-trouble virtual pretexts for diplomatic, economic and military aggression against countries the Western political and corporate elites want to control. Once the supreme war crime is consummated, their financial, military-industrial and other corporate carpet-bagger partners move in.

The New York Times’ Scott Shane recently reported how Western multinational buzzard-corporations are now swooping on Libya while the country is still in conflict with its cities ruined and tens of thousands dead. Shane writes, “Entrepreneurs are abuzz about the business potential of a country with huge needs and the oil to pay for them, plus the competitive advantage of Libyan gratitude toward the United States and its NATO partners. A week before Colonel Qaddafi’s death on Oct. 20, a delegation from 80 French companies arrived in Tripoli to meet officials of the Transitional National Council, the interim government. Last week, the new British defense minister, Philip Hammond, urged British companies to “pack their suitcases” and head to Tripoli. ” (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/29/world/africa/western-companies-see-lib&#8230;)

To brake their relative economic decline against China and other global competitors, the Western Bloc elites of North America and Europe have a brief window of opportunity, perhaps no more than a few years. For centuries, until now, without powerful military competitors, bar the Soviet Union for a while, their global war on humanity has never ceased. What is decisive about their war on Libya is that, more even than the war on Iraq, it signals the war of all against all.

The categorical failure of the United Nations system makes fear of retaliation the only constraint on military aggression. Like Daladier and Chamberlain, who in 1938 abandoned Czechosolvakia to Nazi Germany, Russia’s and China’s rulers abandoned Libya to appease the NATO countries’ ruling corporate-militarist fascists. In doing so, they have only postponed the strategic confrontation with Western Bloc elites that must inevitably take place in some shape or form for control of limited global resources and contested areas of geopolitical interest.

Lessons learned and re-learned

Libya’s expulsion from the UN Human Rights Council and the start of NATO’s bombing campaign took place barely two months after publication of the UN Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic review. Then, in early January 2011, Libya’s report was accepted by all and praised by many of the very nations, like Qatar and Jordan, that participated in NATO’s onslaught just weeks later. Just as happened in Iraq, the evidence adduced to justify the destruction of Libya – in this case allegations of lethal military force against unarmed demonstrators – was completely false.

NATO country governments, their media and non-governmental organizations all depicted the foreign-backed armed insurrection in Libya as a spontaneous peaceful protest. In fact, it was clearly a long-prepared putsch involving renegade government officials, islamic militants, foreign-based subversive groups and powerful local economic elites. Far from being a broadly-based popular uprising, the insurrection was a deeply reactionary coup, backed by NATO country governments, seeking to destroy the revolutionary redistributive system of the Libyan Jamahiriya.

To sell that reactionary destruction of a system self-evidently enjoying majority popular support, international corporate media and non-governmental organizations used psychological warfare more blatantly than ever before. The accusations of Libyan government massacres were false. The absurd claim that Libyan troops were issued with Viagra to facilitate brutal campaigns of mass rape was false.

Hysterical claims that African mercenaries were deployed to murder civilian protestors were also false. This wholesale mass deception reached its climax with international media broadcasts in August of fake footage ostensibly from Libya. In fact, the broadcasts used film shot in Qatar on sets made to look like Tripoli’s Green Square.

International media and non-governmental organizations of all kinds now work openly as politically motivated partners of NATO country governments. Like their international media counterparts, human rights organizations repeated as fact almost every accusation emanating from Libya’s aggressors. They consistently exaggerated and distorted alleged violations by the authorities of the Libyan Jamahiriya.

From the very start of the conflict in Libya, prestigious Western human rights organizations minimized or ignored massive human rights violations by the CNT renegades and their NATO masters. As the aggression against Libya’s people progressed, the pro-NATO political alignment of supposedly neutral human rights and humanitarian organizations became undeniable. Their failure to condemn the bombing of Zliten, the massacres in Tripoli and NATO’s merciless destruction of Sirte and Bani Walid have exhausted whatever moral authority Western NGOs may once have had.

The United Nations Organization failed again to uphold its founding principles of non-aggression and self-determination of peoples. Its Human Rights Council has shown that it is incapable of resisting unscrupulous malevolent political manipulation. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon has operated on behalf of NATO even more blatantly than his predecessors, Boutros Boutros-Ghali or Kofi Annan, who readily collaborated in Western mass-murder, most egregiously in Iraq.

The International Criminal Court is even more discredited as an impartial judicial instrument than it was before. The Court’s indictment of Muammar Al Ghaddafi was based on ridiculously biased news reports and completely unverified accusations by avowed enemies of the Libyan Jamahiriya. The court’s Chief Prosecutor, Luis Moreno Campo, made repeated mistaken announcements – about the Viagra accusations, about the detention of Saif Al Islam – which showed how incompetent and biased he and his staff are at the most basic bureaucratic level.

The colonial practice of the International Criminal Court is a reminder of how the law and international legal practice have consistently been used as a crucial component of economic and psychological warfare by the West against its former colonies. The Libyan authorities – abbreviated by Western media to “Gaddhafi” – were falsely accused of the 1987 Berlin disco bombing and the Lockerbie terrorist bombing. The most recent example of this kind of manipulation has been the Special Tribunal on Lebanon, rigged by NATO governments to further the regional agenda of Israel.

The categorical and irremediable failure of the UN system has been matched by the loss of credibility of world powers and regional organizations. China and Russia have demonstrated their strategic weakness faced with determined NATO country military aggression. The stand they have taken, far too late, over Syria, is unlikely to prevent continuing foreign destabilization of that country or even future NATO or allied military aggression against either Syria and Iran or, in Latin America, against Venezuela.

The Arab League has confirmed its subordination to the reactionary fundamentalist monarchy in Saudi Arabia. Iran and its regional allies Hezbollah and Hamas have confirmed their commitment to cynical, hypocritical regional realpolitik. By validating the war crimes of NATO and its allies in Libya, they have weakened denunciations of Israel’s aggression and war crimes in Palestine and Lebanon. After rushing to recognize the Libyan renegades, Iran, a close ally of the Syrian government, has kept quiet about the renegade Libyan CNT’s recognition of Syria’s opposition CNT.

Perhaps the most disturbing sequel to Libya’s destruction has been international endorsement of the murderous racist CNT renegades by over 100 governments as Libya’s representative in the UN, in complete disregard of the UN’s basic precept of racial equality. Over Libya, the African Union and its member countries were brazenly ignored and humiliated by the governments of the NATO countries and of the Arab League. With some few honourable exceptions, they have abased themselves in the most abject way by validating the actions and policies of Libya’s openly racist, spurious CNT authorities.

A footnote to the destruction of Libya has been the collaboration or collusion in that destruction of almost all the international progressive managerial class that controls intellectual production and distribution in Europe and North America. Outstanding exceptions have been writers like Stella Calloni and Thierry Meyssan. Apart from a very few writers like them, international progressive networks of intellectual production shamelessly reproduced the motifs and misinformation of the NATO government’s psychological warfare campaign.

ALBA and the Libyan Jamahiriya

Virtually the only regional organization to uphold the founding principles of the UN was the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas – ALBA. The ALBA countries are Antigua and Barbuda, Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and Venezuela. Its governments represent over 70 million people. None of these countries recognised NATO’s illegitimate puppet regime in Libya as the representative of the Libyan people in the United Nations.

All the larger ALBA countries have been targets of US and allied terrorism and subversion – just as the Libyan government was permanently since its revolution in 1969. Cuba has suffered economic blockade and US government terrorist attacks since 1960. Nicaragua was attacked throughout the 1980s. The US government and its allies have worked openly to subvert the governments of Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela. To broad regional concern, the US has imposed new US military bases on Colombia and reactivated the US Fourth Fleet.

To see what kind of government the US and its NATO allies want in the region one has only to look at its allies in Colombia, Haiti, Honduras and Mexico. In all these countries, abuses of civil and political rights are far more egregious than under the Libyan Jamahiriya. Journalists, human rights activists and trades unionists are murdered frequently, with impunity. In terms of social, economic and cultural rights all of these countries fall far short of the achievements of the Libyan Jamahiriya.

To see what lies in store for the people of Libya as a colony of NATO country governments, Haiti is the model. Farcical, heavily militarised elections, organized with laughable incompetence, will be held without the country’s largest political movement being allowed to participate. Foreign NGOs will fail lamentably, but profitably for them, to deliver anything approaching adequate health and education services to the population. Government resources will be ruthlessly pared back so as to maximise profitable opportunities for private companies.

By contrast the ALBA countries share with the Libyan Jamahiriya a socialist inspired, solidarity-based system of successful wealth redistribution and social provision via a strong welfare state, ensuring adequate education and health care free to their countries’ low-income majorities. That is why the United States government and its allies persistently denigrate and undermine the ALBA countries. It is why they destroyed Libya.

The US government and its allies cannot accept successful countries which exploit national resources on behalf of their peoples rather than selling them cheap to Western corporate elites. The socialist-inspired ALBA countries are economically successful and make steady progress towards resolving their complex social problems. By contrast, the Western Bloc neo-liberal model pursued in Mexico, Colombia, Honduras and Haiti has resulted in chronic basket-case failure.

Apart from the psychologically conditioned populations of North America and Europe, the whole world can see this for themselves. Internationally, US and European political representatives talking on economic and social matters are a laughing stock. They get a respectful hearing only because they have sufficient military firepower to blow the planet to smithereens and have shown they are brutal and dysfunctional enough to do it.

With their always fake claims of economic competence made to look absurd, even the last two trump cards of the Western powers – human rights and corruption – fail to turn a trick. The governments of countries like the US, Britain, France and Spain have always been vicious human rights abusers in conflicts both domestic and international. The NATO countries’ bogus war on terror has seen Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Guantanamo and extraordinary rendition for torture become the foreign symbols of their common abuse of civil and political rights both overseas and at home.

Likewise, the financial crisis that broke in 2008 has revealed just how deeply run the corrupt links between corporate finance and government in Western political systems. Governments have protected their corporate financial elites, who depend on illicit money laundering and Central Bank largesse to stay liquid, while condemning tens of millions of their compatriots to poverty. That is without examining recurrent scandals involving defence and energy multinationals, like British Aerospace in the UK, ELF in France or rampant cronyism throughout the US government-military-industrial complex.

Muammar Al Ghaddafi and Augusto C. Sandino

It is no accident that the ideological vision underlying ALBA has much in common with the vision of the Libyan Jamihiriya. Among the forerunners of the Libyan Jamahiriya and the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas, the heroic Libyan martyr Omar Mukhtar – like Abd El Krim of the Rif – was contemporary with Nicaragua’s Augusto Cesar Sandino. It is easy to forget or ignore the spiritual, moral dimension of the anti-imperialism those revolutionary forebears bequeathed to the generation of leaders like Daniel Ortega and Muammar Al Ghaddafi.

The brutal murder of Muammar Al Ghaddafi reveals the true dimensions of the continuity between his moral and political vision and that of Sandino and Sandino’s contemporaries. Conscious of this continuity, NATO’s political leaders deliberately set out to murder Ghaddafi’s family, his children and his children’s children. In committing this profound moral transgression, white-collar barbarians like Obama, Clinton, Cameron, Sarkozy and their colleagues have disturbed the West’s own foundational cultural concept of hubris along with its corollary, nemesis.

The morally wretched frauds who lead the Western electoral-oligarchies have every reason to fear the inspirational power of heroic martyrs like Muammar Al Ghaddafi. Imperialist gangster forebears, Calvin Coolidge and Henry Stimson, Franklin Roosevelt and Cordell Hull, likewise feared and denigrated the liberating symbol of Augusto C. Sandino. Engendered by the customs and thought of their peoples, emblematic heroes like Sandino and Ghaddafi pose an undying challenge to the corrupt, sterile greed of foreign conquerors.

The anti-imperialist revolutionary spiritual vision of Augusto C. Sandino envisaged a society of communal solidarity embracing the whole of Latin America and the Caribbean. That Sandinista vision has many roots, in indigenous philosophical thought and religious belief, in Simón Bolívar’s ideas of a united Latin America, in the sacrifices of innumerable martyrs from Tupac Katari to Jean Jacques Dessalines to José Martí, in the complexities of the Mexican revolution, the influence of the Russian Revolution, in masonry and esoteric currents of anarchism.

The same is certainly true of Muammar Al Ghaddafi whose philosophical and religious thought is even more inaccessible to Anglo-Saxon and European minds than that of Augusto C. Sandino. Muammar Al Ghaddafi’s vision was one of direct solidarity-based communal democracy, of Pan-African unity, of a broad African alliance able to withstand the economic and military aggression of the predatory Western powers. His determination to defend this vision lead directly to NATO’s aggression and to his horrific murder, which Hillary Clinton, the exemplary yankee sadist, found so amusing.

For the rest of the world, North America and Europe now represent crass economic failure, egregious domestic and international human rights violations, systemic corruption and criminal militarist aggression. Whatever prosperity and advanced civilization the Western powers have ever enjoyed was always based on genocidal military aggression and the subsequent criminal exploitation of the destroyed peoples’ natural and human resources. The destruction of Iraq, Haiti and Libya embody that reality for the 21st Century.

The only possible sustainable economic model in the world now is one necessarily built on socialist inspired solidarity-based cooperation between strong nation states. That model was exemplified in the Libyan Jamihiriya and its regional relations. The only other region in the world where such a model exists is among the ALBA countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. The oligarchies of North America and Europe reject such a model because they refuse to share the world’s resources equitably.

The only model the Western oligarchs accept is their own unsustainable model of world domination. That is why the United States and its allies wage endless war on humanity. They will continue to do so until either they are strategically defeated or they destroy humanity altogether. That was the meaning of the murder of Augusto C. Sandino. It was the meaning of the murders of Patrice Lumumba and Che Guevara. It is the meaning of the murder of Muammar Al Ghaddafi.